It’s been a week since Valentine’s Day. Some of us celebrated with chocolates, flowers, dinners out, or even a sweet new color wheel ( 😉 ). Now what? There’s still some February leftover. Well, just because it’s no longer Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate what everyday life has to offer—that is why we are sharing instructions as a free download to create an Everyday Life™ sized album that does just that!

Pretty much all of us are equipped to take photos wherever we go, of whatever we want, and whenever we feel like it. As a result, so many of life’s special moments end up stored in a “cloud” somewhere, rarely visited or seen again. Raise your hand if you’ve taken an indefinite number of photos of your cute children, grandchildren, fur babies, or even your food. What do you do with all of these photos? Are they still sitting in your phone? As one of our Consultants so eloquently put it, “don’t let your kids grow up as JPEGs!”

Our message to you today is simple: review the photos that you’ve taken and print them off! Don’t have a place to put them? Use the layouts in this Everyday Life™ album to get started and store your photos along with any stories that go with them.

Photos evoke emotions, capture moods, and remind us of things we long to hold on to. By putting our photos in an album, not only do you get to revisit these feelings, but then we get to share them with others and even allow them to have their own emotional responses. What does that mean? Simply put, it’s important to create albums for your family members and friends to look through. People love seeing pictures of themselves! (You know it’s true!) Children, especially. Create a place for the people you love to look at photos that you love, of whatever you love, through beautiful album pages that share your everyday journey.

Our Heart Happy Everyday Life™ album workshop is a great place to get started, and it will truly make your heart happy. If you’d like to make your very own Heart Happy album, we have a few different bundles of product offered at a reduced price to help you get going. Click on the links below to see which best fits your needs:

One of the great things about the contents of this kit are the versatile words, icons, and shapes found throughout its stamp set, patterned papers, and stickers. Last month, we showed you these very same products used to create some really fun Valentine’s Day cards (click here to download those card instructions). Above, we showed you an album to showcase the everyday moments. Now, we want to show you even more!

Take a look at this 12″ x 12″ layout we came up with using the same stamp set and Heart Happy paper packet combined with a few other products:

(Love never looked so tasty! 🙂 )

We hope today’s post inspires you to do something with all of those memories that you are storing up. Print your photos, write your stories, and create something with them to celebrate the way life looks today. Take the time to make your heart happy!

How many of you smile or laugh when you think about what you wore, ate, watched, or read years ago? Some of the most interesting things that we do are the things that make up our ordinary everyday lives. In the moment, these types of things might seem unimportant, but these stories about everyday life are really fun to look at later on. Documenting those types of things is just as enjoyable and interesting as holidays, vacations, or special occasions.

Today we are breaking down one way to document these extraordinary everyday moments. To make this project even easier, we are using the Story by Stacy™ Short Story workshop kit, and looking at life through the lens of just one week. We asked one of our Home Office staff to take on our process so we could have a real life example to share. She started by taking photos throughout a regular week, documenting what life looks like for her, using the prompts below as a guide.

With this type of project, it’s much easier to start out by taking your photos first. Once you have your photos, all that’s left to do is to follow the steps from the Short Story workbook. At the end of the process, you’ll have a complete mini album full of photos and details with a story summary, just like the one you’ll see at the end of this post.

To get you started on this process, use the following photo prompts list as a guide. There are several different types photos you’ll want to take to document what life looks like for you.

#1 Currently…These are thing things I am currently…

Watching

Reading

Eating

Making

Listening to

Wearing

Doing

#2 Daily HighlightsTake one or two photos each day to represent the daily highlights or important moments. This gives you a glimpse of what might happen during a week that makes it unique or unusual.

#3 The Usual “Stuff”You should also document your routines, habits, and home life for yourself and for your family. This is the usual stuff that doesn’t necessarily change from one day to the next, but it will still be fun to look at years later when life looks a little different.

Download this checklist to help you remember what pictures you want and need for your album. Put it up where you can see it to have a quick reminder of the types of things you’re documenting over the week.

Once you have your photos, choose 35-45 to print and use in your album. Then, follow the steps in the Short Story workbook. You’ll begin by reflecting on your photos and jotting down answers to a few questions. This helps you think about the story before creating and gives you a place to start when you write your summary later on.

Before you start creating pages, look through your photos and pick one to set aside for your title page. Then you’re ready for the next step. To make sure you can include all the photos you’ve printed, you can begin to trim the rest into smaller sizes to focus on the most important parts and the details you want to highlight. Once your photos are trimmed down, it’s time to get creative and make your pages! Some projects that focus on a week at time organize the album by day of the week. We chose to follow the Short Story process, and let the entire album illustrate what a week looks like overall, rather than spend time trying to divide it into specific days. This lets you follow the workbook and trust your creative intuition, plus it comes together a little bit faster. You don’t have to spend any time pairing photos from the same day together.

As you’re creating, feel free to make this project your own! Add other elements that reflect the look and feel of your own story (a week in the life of you!). We included some bright colors, Lemon and Raspberry, using the mix-in paper packet and combined them with other patterned paper that already comes in the Short Story workshop kit. We also used the My Favorite Things stamp set. This set has words, phrases, and shapes that are perfect for this type of project.

You can see even things that seem insignificant are important to the storyteller. If you love the smell of freshly laundered clothes, your usual cup of coffee from a local shop, or even making a home cooked meal for your husband, just like our storyteller here does, then it’s part of your story! These are the little things that will make you laugh and smile down the road when you pick up this album and reflect on what your life looked like in 2019.

After you’ve put all your pages together and added patterned paper and embellishments for visual balance, you’re ready to write that story summary for the end of your album. Just follow the instructions in the workbook, and then you’re done!

Whether you choose to document a week in your daily life with Short Story, or any other scrapbooking format, you can use the ideas here to help you get started. We love how quickly and easily it comes together in a Short Story album, but the important thing is, just like Stacy often reminds us, that you do what no one else can do—tell your story!

We all have photos that hold a special place in our hearts. They remind us of something or someone, and they often have detailed, personal stories that go with them. Stories I Love, the newest program from Story by Stacy™, gives you permission to bring your most treasured photos together in one album and teaches you how to write the unique stories that go along with them.

Your favorite photos may not be the ones that are the most pretty. They may not have the best lighting. They could be candid or staged. They could be from a special occasion or from everyday life. What makes them important are the memories they represent and what you feel when you look at them. That’s what Stories I Love is all about. Each Stories I Love workshop kit comes with a 6″ x 8″ album, ten 6″ x 8″ Memory Protectors™, one title page, one closing page, story pages, base pages, and two sticker sheets. The workbook included in the kit walks you through the steps of exploring the story behind one photo, writing that story, and then creating a 6″ x 8″ layout with just that story and photo.

Are you ready to make your own Stories I Love album? Watch the video below to hear directly from Stacy about this new program and to find out how you can win your very own Stories I Love workshop kit!

You have until 11 a.m. (MST) Thursday, January 17, to enter in the giveaway. Winners will be notified by email on Thursday.

The memories behind the photos you cherish are stories only YOU can tell. Recording your thoughts and feelings transforms every layout you make into a treasured keepsake. We can’t wait to see what you create with Stories I Love!

It’s easy to think that memory keeping needs to be done in a straight, chronological line, scrapbooking your photos as they happen … hopefully, but you can share your photos in many other fun and creative ways. That’s what makes the Story by Stacy™ product line so special. As it’s name suggests, these products invite us to explore the stories behind the photos we take to uncover the details that make them personal and interesting. Story by Stacy™ products encourage us to consider taking a different approach, one that focuses on your unique memories of the subject or topic of your album.

A few weeks ago we shared a handful of ways you can use Story by Stacy™ workshop kits for the holidays. If you missed that blog post, check it out here. Because this month’s special features these amazing kits at a discount, we have a few more ideas for how you can document one-of-a-kind stories in the mini album format with Story Starter. Keep in mind, we’re showing you how to do this with Story Starter, but you could plug these ideas into any scrapbooking format. So many possibilities!

Idea #1: Where I Stand

In this mini album, the storyteller has documented some of the places she’s been, but with a fun twist. All of these photos show shoes and the place where she’s standing. The ground you’ve walked on is also part of our journey. These kinds of photos could be taken anywhere, and in this Story Starter album, sharing the memories and stories about her shoes and where she is gives it an unusual AND intriguing perspective. This is an easy one to take photos for since it could be anywhere—standing at work, in front of your house, on a vacation—literally any place that you go. These types of stories showcase your experiences in a new way, and it reminds you of the places you’ve lived, worked, or traveled.

Idea #2: Happy Places

This Story Starter album is full of photos and memories of places that make this storyteller happy. For her, it’s the beach. Each photo is paired with a memory about what makes these places special, and pops of color are added with the bright colors of the Hello Pumpkin Complements and accents of Sapphire and Mint cardstock to match the photos. This is another fun topic because happy places are unique to you! Think about where you feel like your best self—happy, whole, and content. That’s the perfect subject for a happy place themed album.You could create an entire series of Story Starters just to document the places that make you happy. Or, consider ways you can include other people in this kind of storytelling. You could do a Story Starter album with your family members, highlighting the places that each person loves with a photo and their own stories about that place.

Idea #3: Hometown

Another place you will definitely have stories about is your hometown. A mini album like Story Starter is a great canvas for capturing the things that you love about where you’re from, and the writing process will help you document detailed memories about that particular place. Did you notice what’s on our album cover, “(208)”? It’s an area code! Even the area code is something that’s unique to just that one place. Maybe your hometown is famous for something or has a nickname? As you write your memories and gather photos, think about the community, the landmarks, and even the people. How are those things a part of who you are?
The Story Starter format is also a fun place to try including different kinds of small photos. With the 4″ x 4″ size, you could use small instant photo prints, like we’ve done here, to illustrate your memories.

Feeling inspired to create yet? Just in case you need a few more ideas, take a look at the list below and the examples from Stacy Julian, on her blog.

My Playlist

Music often plays a part in our favorite moments. Think about your favorite songs and write down why you love them. Then use a photo to illustrate the moment. If you don’t have a photo to pair with the musical memory, try including pictures in other ways. You could take a photo of the album cover or the artist. How you listen to music is also part of the experience. Is it on your phone? A record? A casette tape or CD? You could include those kinds of pictures and stories as well.

Memories about Movies/TV Shows

Are there shows you like to watch on a weekend? Any movies you never get tired of seeing? Just like how the music we listen to tells us something about the time and place we live in, so do the movies and shows we watch. You can probably easily list some of your top faves, but have you ever thought about WHY you like them? Use the Story Starter writing process to think about the memories you associate with the movies you love.

A Day (or Week) in the Life

Approach this kind of topic in a new way with Story Starter. Start by first going through the writing portion. Take some time to think about what a day or a week looks like for you. What are the highlights? What are your habits or routines? Do any particular sounds, tastes, or feelings come to mind? Then group those memories together and find (or take) photos to represent them.

Check out these blog posts from Stacy Julian, the Stacy behind Story by Stacy™ products. She used Story Starter albums to tell some fun stories about herself and other memories. Click the links below to learn more about each of these topics.

With all of these ways to share your story, we know you have so much to document with Story Starter! This December take advantage of the great discounts on Story Starter workshop kits and their coordinating stamp sets. Get individual workshop kits and stamps at 20% off the retail price or, because we know you’re going to need more than one, purchase select Story Starter bundles at 30% off their retail price! Not only do these make for great gifts, but they’re an easy way to create timeless treasures with your memories. We can’t wait to see what you create, and when you’re done, make sure you share your story!

We are always looking for new ways to document this season, and today we have some ideas to share with you about how to do this, especially with Story by Stacy™ workshop kits! The Story by Stacy™ product line reminds us to consider the importance of the story behind our photos. Each workshop kit gives us new tools to keep our scrapbooking fresh and story-focused. You can use all of these ideas today within a Story Starter or Short Story album, but don’t forget you could also incorporate these holiday album themes into any scrapbooking project!

Let’s get started!

We know you have stories and photos between Halloween and Christmas, from family get-togethers to opening gifts on Christmas morning, but have you considered how even the little things about the holidays have stories? Even your ornaments and decorations have memories attached to them. Where did you get them? Was it homemade? Do they commemorate an event or special moment?

These types of small stories are perfect for a Story Starter album. You can use the Story Starter workbook to help you remember the details about your holiday ornaments and write small stories to pair with a photo in the album. By taking time to ask yourself questions to revisit the memories you have, your story will include the details that make these ornaments special.

The focus of the Story Starter album is, of course, the stories and photos you include, but you can add quick seasonal embellishments using a holiday stamp set to make it even more festive. In the album we’re showing you today, we added Candy Apple and New England Ivy images and phrases to our pages from the My Acrylix® Christmas Countdown stamp set along with accents of gold shimmer trim. Just these simple additions gave our Story Starter album a distinctive holiday look and feel.

Here are some other ideas for Story Starter albums this season:

People or things you are grateful for this year
Tip: Try using the My Acrylix® Grateful Heart—Scrapbooking stamp set for words and phrases to stamp in a gratitude-themed Story Starter 🙂

Favorite Thanksgiving or Christmas foods

Check out Stacy Julian’s blog here to see how she created a Halloween Story Starter album AND here for an easy way to document the things your family is thankful for in a Story Starter album.

With Story Starter you can pair individual stories and photos together about the same subject, like your Christmas ornaments, but we know that often you just have a lot of photos you want to preserve in a scrapbook. The Short Story format is the answer for you. If you’re anything like us, you’ve taken many, many, many photos during the holidays, and Short Story can help you document those photos by telling a visual story, almost like a picture book, with a summary at the end.

We’ve used Short Story to scrapbook a variety of photos from this little guy’s first few Christmases. He may not remember all the details as he gets big, but this Short Story album will remind him about the fun things he did every year during the holidays. You can combine the patterned paper and embellishments from the workshop kit with a few stamped sentiments and shimmer trim to give your album that special holiday feel. We paired the bright colors of the Short Story patterned paper with the whimsical look of the sentiments in the My Acrylix® Oh What Fun—Scrapbooking stamp set.

With Short Story, you could focus on one particular Thanksgiving or Christmas or gather photos over a longer period of time to highlight the things that have been family traditions or fun holiday activities. Do you take your kids to see Santa every year? You could create a fun Short Story album that shows Santa photos over many years, and then write a summary about them at the end of your album. It’s a fun way to see how your family has grown or changed over time and see how your traditions look throughout the years.

Family Thanksgiving or Christmas traditions

Christmas morning over the years

Visits to Santa

Christmas vacations

Documenting the holidays doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Use these ideas to create Short Story or Story Starter albums that you can pull out every year to remember everything you love about this season, including your own holiday stories and photos. If 12″ x 12″ is more your style, that’s great too! You can use any of these ideas in your scrapbooking, just remember to focus on the story.

With how easily accessible cameras are to us these days, we have been trained over the years to take photos of absolutely everything we experience. From an outing with friends last weekend to the coffee you picked up this morning, we are certain you have photos that you love but aren’t quite sure what to do with. You may have posted some of these on a social media channel and received a bazillion likes, but now that the moment is over you would like to preserve these memories somewhere more permanent. As one of our blog readers you know we’re going to suggest to you that scrapbooking is the answer. (And it is!) But, how do we scrapbook and journal about a cup of coffee?

Today we’re sharing a journaling style that allows us to talk about pretty much any topic under the sun that is based on The Important Book written by Margaret Wise Brown. In her book, the author dedicates a two-page spread to individual common, everyday things—like the sky, an apple, grass, and rain. On one page is an illustration of the subject and on the opposite page is a short passage describing it, starting and ending with what she considers is the most important attribute:

The important thingabout a spoon isthat you eat with it.It’s like a little shovel,You hold it in your hand,You can put it in your mouth,It isn’t flat,It’s hollow,And it spoons things up.But the important thingabout a spoon isthat you eat with it.

Brown made talking about a spoon easy and interesting. If we apply the same principles used to describe this otherwise seemingly mundane subject in our journaling, the occasion will be rare, if at all, where we will be truly stuck with nothing to say.

So, how do we do it? We put together a handy worksheet to help us get started.

First, what is your topic? Write it down. Then, write down as many words and thoughts as you can think of that describe this topic. Your words, your thoughts—this is your story. Next, from all of these things you just wrote down, what stands out to you as the most important? This attribute is how you will start and finish your journaling passage. Use all the other information and details to fill in the middle.

When you are first starting to use this journaling method, stick to the formula on our worksheet to avoid any problems or confusion. As you get more familiar with this way of journaling, then start changing some of the words up (but not the order!).

Here’s a scrapbook layout about our cup of Joe:

The first and last lines in the journaling are the same thought, “The important thing about coffee is how it creates small moments of joy.” All of the in between stuff is insightful into how our friend in the layout feels about coffee, however, there is no question as to why it means all of those things to her. She let’s us know what the important thing about coffee is as she starts to write about it and then circles back to remind us as she closes her remarks.

To help highlight the unique things that are important to you, we paired this journaling model with a 6″ x 8″ album and designed The Important Things Everyday Life™ workshop. (Getting a copy of The Important Book itself, though recommended, is completely optional.)

Each of the eight layouts can feature something that is uniquely important to you, with a large open space on one page for your journaling and the facing page created to add photos illustrating whatever topic you choose to document.

Take a look at these other completed examples from The Important Things album and see how the important thing journaling style is applied to each subject.

The important thing about cookies:

The important thing about friends:

The important thing about my dog, Sophie:

The important thing about rain:

The generic theme of this album and the bright colors and patterns of the Perfectly Imperfect Picture My Life™ cards make this a versatile project to make for yourself, present as a gift, or both!

But, the important thing about memory keeping is preserving our stories.

From photos to journaling and everything in between, it’s no secret that at Close To My Heart we love and value all things to do with memory keeping. One approach that is especially popular this type of year is the photo-a-day method, where you take a photo every day based on a specific prompt for that day. With all of the magical moments that inevitably happen around the holidays, December is a perfect time to take on this style!

To help you fully embrace this memory keeping method, we’ve had a beautiful 6″ x 8″ pocket-scrapbooking album designed especially for the upcoming season. With room for photos and journaling on every page, The Days of December album is specifically designed to capture each day of the month, from the first through the thirty-first.

Our goal with this album is to take the work out of memory keeping so that you are completely prepared to enjoy the memory making part of the season. In addition to providing instructions to create the entire album (check out all of the completed layouts here), we thought we could help you fill its pages as well! Here are 31 prompts we’ve come up with to inspire your journaling and photography this December.

Use these prompts in order, one per day, or switch them up to make the list work for you! Whatever you do, enjoy the moments, make your memories, and then look back on them in a beautiful album time and time again.

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When we scrapbook, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in planning our pages. We spend lots of time deciding where to put the photos, what paper to use, and how to add the perfect embellishments. Never fear! Stacy Julian and Close To My Heart have a new Story by Stacy™ program to help you overcome those hurdles to scrapbook a large amount of photos in a short amount of time. The Short Story workshop kits will teach you a new way to tell your stories. With Short Story, you will re-energize your creativity and learn to trust your intuition as you go.

The Story by Stacy™ product line is all about building stronger storytellers. Through Story Starter, you learned how to access detailed memories and then write them down as small, quick stories with a photo illustration. Now we’re building on that to teach you a new process for working with your photos and memories. Through Short Story, you’ll create an entire album about a person, place, thing, or experience that you love. Short Story focuses on a visual storytelling process with a written summary at the end. Included in each workshop kit is a workbook to walk you through how to do this.

The video above gives you a small peak into what you’ll do using the Short Story workshop kit. First, you’ll consider the surface information related to your photos like where you are or the people you’re with. You’ll also think about questions that will help you interact with your photos. Then it’s time to move on to the creative part and make pages with your photos. This is where you’ll discover how to really let go and allow your creativity to flow. You’ll learn how to trim your photos BEFORE making pages, then attach photos and add patterned paper to each page, and top it all off with embellishments. By the end of the creative process, you’ll be ready to write a story summary to give your unique, authentic point of view at the end of the album.

The colorful patterned paper included in your kit will make your photos stand out in a Short Story album. These double-sided papers are designed to work well with any photos with a variety of solid color prints, multi-color prints, and even a few black and white designs.

Short Story workshop kits also come with lots of options for embellishing your pages, like you see in the photos above. Each kit includes die-cuts, stickers, gingham ribbon, dots, and white twine. You’ll notice that all of the Short Story embellishments are black and white. Black and white embellishments will help you tie your layouts together and create visual flow without distracting from the story your photos are telling.

To make personalizing your pages even more fun, there is also a special stamp set designed to use in a Short Story album. The My Acrylix® Simply Said stamp set includes letters, numbers, symbols, and icons that are just the right size for the Short Story format.

There are so many stories you can tell with Short Story. It could be a specific event or vacation. You could use Short Story to document a relationship over time with a family member or friend, or it could be about something else you just really love. Whatever subject you choose, this process allows you to scrapbook a large amount of photos in a fun, colorful way. Just like Story Starter, this is a project you can start and FINISH. You don’t have to plan ahead or worry about making decisions as you go. Trust your own creative intuition and see where it takes you!

What kinds of stories do you plan to tell with Short Story? Share your ideas with us in the comments below.

These first two pages are the title and subject introduction of this album, where we get invited into a little girl’s “marvelous summer” adventures. In the pages that follow, we recount 10 of Ali’s favorite summer memories doing all of our stamping using only the number and alphabet Solos. Can you spot your favorite?

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Jeanette Lynton

Meet Jeanette Lynton—wife, mother, artist, and Founder & CEO of one of the world’s leading companies in the papercrafting industry. This blog is dedicated to all who share her love of creativity. Visit often, share your stories, and become family!

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